Mary was ‘co-redeemer with Jesus,’ speaker tells Presbyterian conference
By Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online, January 27, 2003
SAN ANTONIO – Mary, the mother of God, was “a co-redeemer with Jesus Christ” because she “took on the suffering” of marginalization and liberated women, the keynote speaker told nearly 200 participants at the biennial conference of the Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association.
In his keynote address Jan. 24, the Rev. Virgilio Elizondo sketched out a liberation theology scenario in which Mary, both as a Galilean and a woman, was marginalized within her society. Galilee, he said, was “a crossroads to everywhere, a center of nowhere” that had been invaded numerous times, much like San Antonio.
Elizondo, director of programming for Catholic Television in San Antonio and a professor and lecturer, is considered the father of Latino theology in the United States. Since the 1970s, he has researched the mestizaje experience – what happens when cultures collide and new cultures emerge.
The Jewish people of Galilee were mestizaje, a mixture, a hybrid – neither Gentile nor the “pure-minded Jews of Jerusalem,” Elizondo said, comparing them to the Mexican-Americans of the southwestern United States. The Jews were scorned by the Gentiles, and the Galilean Jews were regarded with patronizing contempt by the ‘pure-minded’ Jews of Jerusalem, he said. The natural mestizaje of Galilee was a sign of impurity and a cause for rejection, and it was assumed that Galilean women were immoral and had liaisons with the Gentiles.
“The Pharisees looked down upon ‘the people of the land’ because they were ignorant of the law. The Sadducees looked down upon them because they were somewhat lax in matters of religious attendance and familiarity with the rules of temple worship,” Elizondo explains in A Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise.
“The rigorous religious intellectuals castigated the Galileans for allowing their religion to be contaminated with foreign ways, for being lax, ignorant of the law, and therefore incapable of pure Jewish piety. Because they were unable to pronounce certain sounds, they were mocked and laughed at by educated persons, both Greek and Jewish. … Galileans were sometimes forbidden to recite the public prayers in the synagogue.”
It was in this culture that the angel appeared to Mary and said, “Thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:31).
“Who was going to believe Mary?” Elizondo asked. “The angel was alone.”
Her following the will of God, and suffering marginalization at the hands of the dominant society of her time, liberated women, he said. “I personally believe that Mary is a co-redeemer with Jesus. She took on the suffering.”
Jesus was born into that same society. “When God enters humanity, what kind of man does he become?” Elizondo asked. A Jew, “a member of an oppressed minority, but also a Galilean Jew despised by Jews,” he said.
By entering human life as an outcast, a member of the lowest level of society, Elizondo said Jesus learned what it’s like to be abandoned, to be punished for things he didn’t do and mocked for who he was. That suffering enabled Jesus to show that God is present in each of us, no matter where we’re from, how we talk, what our lifestyle is or what our culture is.
“His ministry offered an active outreach, the breaking of taboos against women in favor of people,” he said. “He touched those who were not only sick but excluded. He scandalized everyone by refusing to be scandalized by anyone. He was there to break the rules in favor of the people.”
Today, Elizondo said, there is a “fearful responsibility of being a Christian in the United States.” He likened it to the saying, “To whom God has given much, much is expected.”
“Don’t be afraid of going back to the source of our faith – Jesus Christ,” he said. That means that Christians should work to “continue creatively the work of Jesus, actualizing the work of Jesus in our homes, neighborhoods, churches, cities.”
In practice, Elizondo said, that means Christians are to develop a “positive prejudice toward another. The challenge of the Church is to develop a spirituality of welcome,” of crossing borders between people and building community.
As an example, he told a story about a patient dying from AIDS in the early days of the disease, when not much was known about it.
Elizondo arrived at the hospital, but had to put on a mask, gloves and a gown before he could enter the sick man’s room. Sitting by the bedside, praying and talking, he said he realized that the man had been abandoned by his family, shunned by his friends and now couldn’t be touched by the health-care professionals who were caring for him.
The pastoral team of which Elizondo was a part set up a schedule and continued to visit the dying man. One Sunday night, Elizondo said, he received a call from the hospital that the man probably would not survive the night. He drove to the hospital and went to the man’s room. Knowing that the man used to enjoy singing and dancing, Elizondo and the man sang a song as the life ebbed from his body. As the man died in his arms, Elizondo said he had a smile on his face because he felt spiritual peace at being a member of a faith community.
“The ultimate liberation,” he said, “is to say, ‘I am. I am a fine person.’ That’s God’s gift to us. The sin of the world is the inability to see them [the marginalized] as God created them.”